Supporting Cooperative Requirements Engineering with an Automated Tool

Requirements Engineering – one of the macro -activities of Sofware Engineering – is a systematic process of capturing, modeling and documenting requirements through an iteractive and cooperative approach[13]. It’s an activity which require s team work. Groups of people formulate requirements, design and implement a system and execute quality assurance activities during the software process[28]. The cooperative work becomes necessary since solutions require different knowledge and professionals become more specialized[3]. Viewing these aspects, it’s worthwhile to use computational resources to support the cooperative Requirements Engineering activities. The area of Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) is interested in how groups of people working on a cooperative basis can be assisted by computational support[28]. This work investigates how solutions from the CSCW area can support Requirements Engineering activities and introduces CRETA – a Cooperative Requirements Engineering support tool, which intends to integrate groupware applications into applications supporting Requirements Engineering. This tool was developed for the Web, using the object-orientation paradigm.